31–40 of 46 posts
Some rendering screenshots would help. I'm viewing this on my iPad and the only difference I see is bad kerning in the examples on the right.
If you don't see any difference think about how many people are viewing your app/site on windows machines and having to look at the horrible default rendering.
You can always tell when a site is build with Apple and not throughout tested on Windows, the fonts are always horrible, and there are very few tested services that render fonts across OS/browsers the right way, so this is a great idea.
This affects mainly Windows users (why I do not know.. but the default Google fonts have always look like shit on my Windows machine). If you don't see any difference think about how many people are viewing your app/site on windows machines and having to look at the horrible default rendering. You can always tell when a site is build with Apple and not throughout tested on Windows, the fonts are always horrible, and…
Some rendering screenshots would help. I'm viewing this on my iPad and the only difference I see is bad kerning in the examples on the right.
Same here (OS X, Safari). It doesn't look much better in the demos either. Their demos include some truly horrific examples, like Linux, Firefox 24, Ubuntu: http://fontcombiner.com/docs/media/demo/linux_firefox_ubuntu...
Both of these have the horrible rainbow effects around the edges of the letters, presumably from sub-pixel anti-aliasing.
But I'm an outlier, basically the only way I can read text without serious eyestrain is aliased with good hinting. Somehow the "jaggies" which so distress most people are completely innocuous for me, while I can't tolerate any of the fuzzy/blurry look that most readers bizarrely call "sharp".
Some rendering screenshots would help. I'm viewing this on my iPad and the only difference I see is bad kerning in the examples on the right.
Same here (OS X, Safari). It doesn't look much better in the demos either. Their demos include some truly horrific examples, like Linux, Firefox 24, Ubuntu: http://fontcombiner.com/docs/media/demo/linux_firefox_ubuntu...
Most notably, to my eye, the text on the right has unappealing kerning changes.
A concrete example, visible in the screen-shot you linked: look at the words "little three" at the top right of the second paragraph. In the original rendering, the space between the pair of 't's and the 't' and 'h' pair is correct. In the modified rendering on the right, there is an excess pixel between the pair of 't's and the 't' and 'h' pair.
Uneven spacing of letters is one of the reasons I am unhappy when I use Chrome, since it still doesn't support DirectWrite on Windows [1].
[1] http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541
And for platforms that do use it I thought it ran ttfautohint to generate it, which sounds incredibly similar to what these guys do.
Relatedly, Google fonts also has sophisticated subsetting options which this page claims as an improvement over Google's offering.
edit: relevant links
http://www.freetype.org/ttfautohint/index.html
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QTX1lU97z08 (27 minutes in for stripping hints on non-windows requests)
http://googlewebfonts.blogspot.com/2011/04/streamline-your-w...
I was under the impression that Google Fonts stripped hinting to speed download since its entirely ignored by many platform/browser combinations. And for platforms that do use it I thought it ran ttfautohint to generate it, which sounds incredibly similar to what these guys do. Relatedly, Google fonts also has sophisticated subsetting options which this page claims as an improvement over Google's offering. edit: rele…
Hinting and vertical metrics are quite the rabbit hole across platforms. This is a good article http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/24/a-closer-look-at-...
Font kerning is very new to web browsers. So far as I'm aware neither of the fonts demonstrated at the top of the post contain kerning information. The heavy fonts lower down do.
Font Combiner itself is still very new. Tracking or character spacing (as opposed to kerning) may benefit from some additional tweaks for OSX. This is outside of the scope of the current UI.